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Playful Subversion with Chinese Characters

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Playful Subversion with Chinese Characters International Journal of Multilingualism ISSN: 1479-0718 (Print) 1747-7530 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rmjm20 Tranßcripting: playful subversion with Chinese characters Li Wei & Zhu Hua To cite this article: Li Wei & Zhu Hua (2019): Tranßcripting: playful subversion with Chinese characters, International Journal of Multilingualism, DOI: 10.1080/14790718.2019.1575834 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14790718.2019.1575834 © 2019 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Published online: 18 Feb 2019. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 880 View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rmjm20 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MULTILINGUALISM https://doi.org/10.1080/14790718.2019.1575834 Tranßcripting: playful subversion with Chinese characters Li Weia and Zhu Huab aUCL Centre for Applied Linguistics, University College London, London, UK; bDepartment of Applied Linguistics and Communication, Birkbeck College, University of London, London, UK ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY This article discusses a relatively under-explored phenomenon that Received 14 December 2018 we call Tranßcripting – writing, designing and digitally generating Accepted 30 December 2018 new scripts with elements from different scriptal and semiotic KEYWORDS systems. The data are drawn from examples of such scripts Tranßcripting; created by multilingual Chinese users in everyday online social translanguaging; language interaction. We analyse the dynamic processes of how such scripts ideology; social media; are created that transcend language boundaries as well as Chinese transforming the subjectivities of the writer and the reader. We are particularly interested in the playful subversiveness of such practices, and discuss it against the background of uni-scriptal language ideology in China. We are also interested in the methodological challenges of researching such practices, including the challenge of drawing distinctions between the ‘ordinary’ and the ‘unordinary’. We analyse the data from a translanguaging perspective. On 28th August 2012, a group of over 100 language enthusiasts, public figures and aca- demics in China wrote an open letter to the State Administration of Press and Publication and the State Language Commission to protest the inclusion of 239 so-called alphabetic words in the latest, 6th edition of the popular dictionary A Dictionary of Modern Chinese. The letter writers claimed that the inclusion of words such as NBA, CPI, and PM2.5 violated the Chinese laws regarding the protection of the Chinese writing system, because the Chinese script is not alphabetic but logographic.1 A national debate ensued, with unpre- cedented media coverage. The vast majority seemed to be on the side of the complainants who evidently felt that the Chinese language was under threat from foreign influence. Those who argued for the acceptance of alphabetic words were in the minority and seen as rebels. The dictionary compilers, many of whom were senior academics in public office, had to issue lengthy explanations. They argued that the dictionary was not intended to dictate what was acceptable but to record words in common usage. This incident is only one example of how strongly the Chinese feel about their writing system. They believe that the Chinese script is one of the oldest continually used writing systems in the world; that it has had a major influence on other East Asian languages and beyond; and that all attempts in history to change the system have failed. Nonetheless, new writing inventions appear all the time in China, and most of them are intrinsically CONTACT Li Wei [email protected] © 2019 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 2 L. WEI AND Z. HUA tied to social, cultural, political and economic changes. This article focuses on the emer- ging phenomenon of creating scripts that defy the writing conventions of Chinese by incorporating elements that are deemed ‘foreign’ or by manipulating the structural norms of Chinese written characters, including their traditional sound-meaning mapping process and visual representation. We call this phenomenon ‘tranßcripting’. While we want to highlight the creative processes of tranßcripting, our main purpose is to explore the socio-political dimensions of the phenomenon, in particular, the playful sub- version it represents. Understood from the analytical perspective of translanguaging, we emphasise how such subversion occurs through the usage of ‘non-Chinese’ language resources and how such practices are ‘ordinary’ linguistic phenomena created and circu- lated by ordinary people in everyday, digitally mediated social interaction (Dovchin, 2017; see also Androutsopoulos, 2007; Blommaert, 2015). Simultaneously, they are examples of how the ‘ordinary’ can be both linguistically ‘playful’ and ‘subversive’, commonly practised in spite of various official efforts to censor their usage and minimise their sociocultural impact. The Chinese script and the Chinese uni-scriptal ideology The Chinese writing system is roughly logosyllabic (i.e. a character generally represents a syllable in spoken Chinese); it may be a word on its own or part of a di- or polysyllabic word. Some characters are pictographs or ideographs, depicting objects or abstract notions they denote; others are either logical aggregates in which two or more parts are used to yield a composite meaning, or phonetic complexes where one part indicates the general semantic category of the character and the other part the phonetic value, which are known as semantic and phonetic radicals, respectively. Many Chinese characters in use today can be traced back to the late Shang Dynasty, about 1200–1050 BCE, though the process of creating the characters is thought to have begun some centuries earlier. Historically, Chinese characters have been widely used throughout East Asia: they spread to Korea during the 2nd century BCE; they were adopted for writing Japanese during the 5th century CE; and they were first used in Vietnam in 111 BCE. Overall, this spread gave rise to the notion of the Sinosphere or Sinophone World, variably known also as the Sinic world, the Chinese cultural sphere, and the Hanzi (Chinese characters) cul- tural sphere/world. Several languages of south and southwest China, including Zhuang, Miao and Yao, were formerly written in Chinese characters or in writing systems based on Chinese characters. The characters’ long history, logosyllabic structure, and influence in East Asia have all contributed to the popular belief amongst Chinese language users that their writing system is unique and virtuous, as it is intrinsically linked with Confucian- ism, Taoism and Buddhism, and has mystical power to bind people together culturally and spiritually. The belief in the uniqueness of the Chinese writing system manifests in a number of contradictory views. For instance, many Chinese hold the view that there is only one writing system for the Chinese language, and that the First Emperor of China, Zheng of Qin (259–210 BCE), unified the writing system so that speakers of mutually unintelligible regional varieties of Chinese could all use the same script in written communication. In fact, there is a very long tradition of regional written Chinese. Scholars such as Snow and Chen (2015) and Bauer (2018) have documented in detail written Cantonese since INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MULTILINGUALISM 3 the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644 CE), a tradition that has seen new growth in the last twenty or thirty years in Hong Kong. Other regional varieties of Chinese such as Wu, which includes Shanghainese and Suzhounese, developed their writing systems at similar times (see Snow, Shen, & Zhou, 2018; Snow, Zhou, & Shen, 2018). Admittedly, these writing systems are based broadly on Chinese characters. But they are sufficiently different that a reader fluent in Mandarin would not be able to comprehend a text written in these regional languages. There are other well-documented cases of different writing systems for different varieties of Chinese. For example, Nüshu, literally ‘women’s script’, was used exclusively among women in the Hunan province of China during the 13th century. Unlike the standard written Chinese characters, Nüshu is phonetic, with a syllabary of approximately 600–700 items. The Dictionary of Nüshu lists 1,800 variant char- acters and allographs (Zhou, 2002). Dungan, used by the Dungan people in Central Asia, especially those who are Muslims of Chinese descent in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Russia, was previously written in Arabic script and is now written in Cyrillic. Its spoken form is comprehensible to the speakers of northwestern varieties of Mandarin. Moreover, there are at least two main transliteration systems for Chinese: pinyin and bopomofo. The former is based on the Latin alphabet. The latter, also known as Zhùyīn fúhào, derives its symbols from ancient Chinese writing, and was used in China before the 1950s and is still used in Taiwan. There is also Jyut6jyu5 for transcribing Cantonese. Historically, a number of transliteration systems, including the Wade-Giles for Mandarin, and
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